The Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) has been established by the Department of the Army's Office of Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization to carry out Congressional mandates of 1986 and 1988. The first mandate, the Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1986 (PL 99-145), directed and authorized the Secretary of Defense to destroy the United States stockpile of lethal unitary chemical munitions and agents by Sep. 30, 1994; the Act was amended in 1988 (PL 100-456) to permit operations testing of a commercial scale incinerator design and to allow for unitary munitions disposal completion by April 1997. The inventory of material to be destroyed includes the organophosphate nerve agents GA, GB, and VX, as well as the vesicant (blister) agents H, HD, HT (various formulations of sulfur mustard), and Lewisite (an organic arsenical).
There is great concern regarding skin exposure to these chemical warfare agents for personnel involved in handling and disposing of these species, as well as those civilian emergency personnel who may need to respond to an unplanned agent release. The degree of protection provided civilian emergency workers in a chemical agent environment is a current unknown due to the untested status of readily available protective clothing. Methods are needed to determine which materials can be used as protective barriers against hazardous or toxic chemical warfare agents.
Furthermore, many hazardous and toxic chemicals are not easily detected by conventional techniques such as luminescence, normal Raman or infrared spectroscopics. There is a strong need to develop practical methods for monitoring these chemicals for environmental and human exposure protection.
The experimental sampling protocol of the subject invention is based on two previous works characterizing the permeation of petroleum products through protective clothing materials using luminescence techniques for detecting polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAC) contained in the petroleum products. A method which uses room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) was reported by T. Vo-Dinh and D. A. White, "Room Temperature Phosphorimetry to Study Petroleum Product Permeation Through Protective Clothing Materials," Applied Spectroscopy 42(1988), 285-288. A method using fluorescence techniques was also reported by T. Vo-Dinh and D. A. White, "Development of Luminescence Procedures to Evaluate Permeation of Multi-Ring Polyaromatic Compounds Through Protective Materials," J. Amer. Industrial Hygiene Assoc. 48(1987), 400-405. However, since the chemicals of interest in the subject invention do not contain PAC and are not strongly fluorescing and/or phosphorescing, a novel and sensitive spectroscopic method for the detection of permeation and breakthrough time using spectroscopic modification of an indicator compound is presented.